Ive been participating in fantasy baseball drafts for years now. (I I think I had Mike Pagliarullo on my first team. I was 12 yrs old, what did I know?)

For some reason I just like point based leagues better than 5 by 5. Thats right!. My name is Ziggy and I play points based fantasy baseball. I feel much better out of the closet.

Getting to the point, if there are any points based leaguers out there, I would like to know how your scoring system works. We have a successful system that we have been using for about 6 or 7 years now, which we are very happy with, but it can never hurt to see other opinions and formats.

Our league is a 12 team head to head and we start 9 hitters 4 Starting pitchers and 1 Closer per week.

While I would love to hear opinions, the benefit as far as I am concerned is it seems that this format gives more credence to better "hitters" as opposed to just straight power guys. It seems that it raises the value of guys who have good OBA, OPS, and K-BB ratio. but it doesnt change enough to skew it unfairly.

as far as Arod, not many people realize that he had a down year last year. His strikeouts were way up, especially in the first half. In a typical year he scores around 515 points in our league. FUrcal obv had a career year, but if you take a look he had more doubles, triples, run scored, SB and a better k-bb ratio. 25 points between them is not crazy, for last year at least.

I am also a fan of point leagues. There is just a little more excitement involved than in roto. I play in roto leagues because it is "true" to the game of baseball. Both styles have their pros and cons.

I was very interested in these posts because I have been trying to come up with alternative point scoring systems for a while now. I have tried many different systems and have come to a conclusion. A good scoring system maintains a consistency in the points scored ratios of Batters:Starting Pitchers:Closers. The goal is to not make any one position(batter, SP, and Closer) dominate to the others. At first I was thinking that saves and wins should not be equal and a strikeout should not equal a half of an inning pitched, but I began to realize that I shouldnt compare individual categories but the entire batting stats to the entire pitching stats.

When I kept trying different point systems, I was surprised to see that the basic point system was a very good system. The basic is:

Most of you probably are like me and want more scoring catagories to make it more realistic. For batters: strikeouts, caught stealing, grand slam, hit for cycle, sacrifice flies or hits, errors, and ect. For pitchers: losses, blown saves, singles-double-triples-HR allowed, shutouts, perfect game, holds, quality starts, and ect.

You have to be careful when altering the point systems because when you add a negative category, you need to add a positive or add a negative to the other position. For example(this is based on the basic point system above), I really think that batters should be penalized for strikeouts, so lets give them -1 for Ks. To compensate for that loss lets increase the value of RBI and Runs to 1.5 each. That generally equals out pretty well. When you go back and look at it, the overall ratios havent changed that much. Its just easier to use the basic system and its still as accurate.

I took the basic scoring system and averaged the top 10 batters, top 5 starting pitchers, and top 5 closers to see how they compared in points. Batters-696:Starting Pitchers-687.6:Closers-689.2. That gets to be pretty dang equal. I also took the top 10 Batters and top 10 Pitchers (both RP and SP) and averaged them and got: Batters-696:Pitchers-692.

I know that the basic system is not perfect, but I am just saying that its good. Now I have several other systems which I have altered and added more categories, but they havent come out as equal as the basic.

I would love for anyone to give me some more insight on this. Please point things out that I may not have considered. Wow, this is extremely long, sorry

If anyone is interested in a playing in a points leage please email me at mailto:ccorman68@yahoo.com and I will send you all of the rules

Fumbler wrote:Like was mentioned earlier, i would be worried about upsetting the balance if you add the negative points for blown saves and losses.

If you factor those in without decreasing some offensive points then the batters will outscore the pitchers by quite a bit.

Yeah, I totally agree. If you wanted to add losses and blown saves, you are going to have to increase one or two of the positive pitching stat categories. It would probably be best if you lessened the penalty for a blown save. I dont know if you are using the basic points system as a base, but if you are I would probably increase the amount for innings pitched. If you score 2 points per inning I would say maybe 1/4 of a point increase in innings pitched. You will get some crazy looking numbers in your stats. Or you may want to penalize batters -1/2 point for a strikeout. Both of those adjustments would most likely result in about -30 to -60 point range on the total scoring of batter and pitchers

See everytime I end up trying to adjust or add stat categories I see how much easier it is to keep the basic because its pretty dang accurate for its purpose(I know roto is way more accurate, dont jump down my throat quite yet).

We thought about adding blown saves bc it was frustrating to see a guy blow a save and then get a win, but the thinking is that if you look, just about every reliever has between 4 and 8 blown saves a year. It wouldnt really make that much of a difference, and it would only drag relievers down further.

I see there´s a lot of guys out there who like me just enjoy FP better. Great example on Arod. I was looking at his FP points average all year long last season and it was clear he wasnt having that great of a season(For him that is wich is like saying youre pissed of that you couldnt sleep with Jessica Alba and had setlle for Jessica Simpson) He was striking out wait too much and having many o-for many nights. Same goes for Nomar who went on this terrible hitting valleys.
Anyway weve playing with the old sandbox system for 4 years now. Last year we switched to yahoo and i changed some things about the system. 1-SB=1pts. My thought here is that much of the system is a point for each base. If you steal you take one base and doesnt give that much importance to guys like Alex Sanchez or Roger Cedeño who in reality are terrible baseball players. Also it gets guys like Soriano theire true value. For all i know Soriano is not a great hitter yet and if you ask for the top 10 hitters in baseball he´d have a tough time making it. Still he always gets picked among the top 3 in h2h and roto. Vladimir Guerrero is one of the best hitter in baseball but not a great basestealer. He gets caught all the time. So unless youre taking points away for getting caught i dont think SB should get 2 points
2-Error I have no idea why this would be a category since it happens on the field. Fantasy is about hitting and pitching.
3-Blown saves: For the reasons listed on the other posts. It just made the system unbalanced and even without it the good closers were way ahead of the bad ones.
4-Grounded into double play. It gave a lot of value to guys who hit when the bases had runners on or killed an inning. You wouldnt believe how Nomar killed me last year with those.

I also added Holds last year but i only gave it 3 points and it made no difference from years before making other RP´s other than closers worthless. Im thinking about giving them 10 points for hold. Any thoughts?

On a final note. I always give 3 points for IP cause otherwise the closers would become too valuable. Eric Gagne was the top player last year and i think it is deserve since nobody did his job better in baseball last year(i dont think a closer will ever be more important than a closer and yes i think closers are a babied breed of mostly starter rejects but still they have a job to do) and another advantage they have is that some of them have SP eligibility like Shacon and Graves and whoever owned Rocky Biddle last year knows how valuable that is between starts.

"Nothing is this world worth remembering was ever accomplished without Pasion"-Hegel